/*
 * Copyright (c) 2007, 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 * ORACLE PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL. Use is subject to license terms.
 */
package com.sun.org.apache.bcel.internal.classfile;

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/**
 * Unknown (non-standard) attributes may be read via user-defined factory
 * objects that can be registered with the Attribute.addAttributeReader
 * method. These factory objects should implement this interface.
 *
 * @author <A HREF="mailto:markus.dahm@berlin.de">M. Dahm</A>
 * @see Attribute
 */
public interface AttributeReader {

  /**
   * When this attribute reader is added via the static method
   * Attribute.addAttributeReader, an attribute name is associated with it.
   * As the class file parser parses attributes, it will call various
   * AttributeReaders based on the name of the attributes it is
   * constructing.
   *
   * @param name_index An index into the constant pool, indexing a ConstantUtf8 that represents the
   * name of the attribute.
   * @param length The length of the data contained in the attribute.  This is written into the
   * constant pool and should agree with what the factory expects the length to be.
   * @param file This is the data input stream that the factory needs to read its data from.
   * @param constant_pool This is the constant pool associated with the Attribute that we are
   * constructing.
   * @return The user-defined AttributeReader should take this data and use it to construct an
   * attribute.  In the case of errors, a null can be returned which will cause the parsing of the
   * class file to fail.
   * @see Attribute#addAttributeReader(String, AttributeReader)
   */
  public Attribute createAttribute(int name_index,
      int length,
      java.io.DataInputStream file,
      ConstantPool constant_pool);
}
